/*
 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
 * contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with this
 * work for additional information regarding copyright ownership. The ASF
 * licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
 * "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
 * You may obtain a copy of the License at
 * 
 * http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 * 
 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT
 * WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the
 * License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under
 * the License.
 */

package org.apache.commons.codec;

/**
 * <p>
 * Provides the highest level of abstraction for Encoders. This is the sister
 * interface of {@link Decoder}. Every implementation of Encoder provides this
 * common generic interface whic allows a user to pass a generic Object to any
 * Encoder implementation in the codec package.
 * </p>
 * 
 * @author Apache Software Foundation
 * @version $Id: Encoder.java 1075406 2011-02-28 16:18:26Z ggregory $
 */
public interface Encoder {

	/**
	 * Encodes an "Object" and returns the encoded content as an Object. The
	 * Objects here may just be <code>byte[]</code> or <code>String</code>s
	 * depending on the implementation used.
	 * 
	 * @param source
	 *            An object ot encode
	 * 
	 * @return An "encoded" Object
	 * 
	 * @throws EncoderException
	 *             an encoder exception is thrown if the encoder experiences a
	 *             failure condition during the encoding process.
	 */
	Object encode(Object source) throws EncoderException;
}
